In January 2024, the influential policy maven and former Republican Party operative Oren Cass proposed a new test for conservative social policies, arguing that they should satisfy two principles: “family is good” and “supporting family means supporting working families.”11xOren Cass, “Passing a Test on Family Policy,” American Compass, January 31, 2024; https://americancompass.org/passing-a-test-on-family-policy/. Just four years earlier, Cass founded American Compass, a Washington, DC, think tank devoted to challenging the free-market, libertarian hegemony to which elements of both the right and left subscribe. Opposing that neoliberal consensus, American Compass advanced a new brand of conservatism, often called national conservatism, which envisions a politics aimed at affirming a common morality derived from national tradition. In pursuit of that vision, American Compass calls for an active state to shape an economy reflecting the “importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.”22xHenry Olsen, “This New Think Tank Wants to Reform Conservatism. Republicans Ignore It at Their Peril,” Washington Post, May 5, 2020, quoting the American Compass mission statement.
The occasion for Cass’s test was the response of the Wall Street Journal to a bipartisan bill that expanded the Child Tax Credit. The paper’s editorial board had called the bill an unwarranted handout to taxpayers, comparing the Child Tax Credit to a subsidy for buying a Tesla. The editors worried that the bill, if adopted, would discourage work and economic growth.33xEditorial Board, “Tax Credit Bidding War,” Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2017. Cass countered that such arguments were absurd. Government has a responsibility to promote childbearing and child rearing, he argued, and “support for working families” was not the same thing as “unconditional cash payments.” Cass admonished conservatives to reject “decades of WSJ-style economic policy.” They should look ahead to 2025, when, he predicted, family policy would assume heightened political importance.44xCass, “Passing a Test on Family Policy.”
Cass’s warning was prescient. And it was heeded just as much by liberals and progressives as by conservatives. In the 2024 election, shared grievances about the plight of working families under neoliberalism spanned the political spectrum. Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris tried to own the issue by emphasizing the Democratic Party’s historic ties to labor, her own biography as the daughter of a single working mother, and pro-family policies such as insurance coverage for IVF. Donald Trump, however, was able to control the working families discourse by linking it to related cultural tropes: a blustering, misogynist masculinity, gun rights, Christianity, “law and order,” and rugged rural values. Trump further solidified his connection to a specific variant of pro-family politics by selecting Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate. Claiming to be a postliberal Catholic, Vance professes belief in the natural status of families, prior to the state, and in the elevation of community over individual rights.55xJonathan Liedl, “JD Vance Is a Catholic ‘Post-Liberal’: Here’s What That Means—and Why It Matters,” National Catholic Register, July 24, 2024; https://www.ncregister.com/news/j-d-vance-is-a-catholic-post-liberal.
Far beyond rhetoric, family policy is at the heart of an intense debate about the future of any plausible post-neoliberal governance. Precipitated in part by the crisis of care experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the political discontent with neoliberal family policy has reached a fever pitch. Competing alternatives of family support have emerged. The political right and left share the belief that the past half century’s intensification of private responsibility for social reproduction—the labor and resources necessary to sustain life and reproduce the next generation—has proven disastrous. But they offer dramatically different agendas based on which working families they believe government should support and what forms that support should take.